The Clipboard History does what the name implies. It keeps history of what you put in your clipboard and can restore it later. So you can copy multiple items to the Clipboard and paste it one by one.

The nice thing about ClipboardHistory I found is, that it stores plain text, RTF and even pictures. But you have to choice to paste it as just plain text. This is very handy if you have to cite from HTML formatted emails and the like.

ClipboardHistory is available for about 3,99 € in the Mac App Store.

There is a free alternative called JumpCut that I used before. That stores only plain text in the history. So Clipboard History is a bit more flexible here. And also offers a search windows for you history. So worth the few bucks if you ask me.

ControlPlane is a nice tool that helps me changing certain settings when I switch work environments. I use my Laptop at Home and in the Office. There are different network environments and stuff I would need to adjust every time I move. ControlPlane can recognize these environment changes and can execute certain actions on change.

For me it switches to a different network location profile to adopt the proxy settings and starts and stops certain programs.

ControlPlane seems to be the successor of Marco Polo which is discontinued.

This little Snitch is a tool for control freaks. It acts like a reversed firewall. It captures traffic from applications on your computer to the network. So you can explicitly allow or deny applications to talk to hosts on the network. It also gives you a monitor on which applications talks to which hosts etc.

This is my control center for applications. LaunchBar gives you sort of a command line interface for launching applications and other stuff. Just hit the trigger key (Ctrl + Space) and start typing some letters of the application you want to start. Once there is a match in the LaunchBar hit Enter and you’re done.

No searching and clicking with a mouse for application launch. LaunchBar supposedly also can maintain clipboard history. But I don’t use this feature at the moment.

Unix-Freaks always love those little meters and gauges displaying all sort of system metrics. Of course there is a Mac way to have this. The most popular is possibly iStats Menus. This stays in the menu bar and can display CPU load, Memory usage, Network throughput etc. at a glance and more detailed measures with a simple click.

DropBox offers you 2GB of cloud storage + synchronization for free. Think of it as an folder on your disk that is constantly synced with a cloud service. So you can keep this folder in sync on several Computers (not limited to Macs).

I use this to store stuff I need on multiple computers like Password Database, TextExpander repo etc.

Make sure you read and understand their small print. Basically they’ll own your data if you use the service. So don’t put stuff their that you don’t like to be shared (copyright protected material, unencrypted personal stuff etc.)

Evernote is a note keeping application. That itself isn’t something spectacular. What makes Evernote unique is, that it’ll sync your notes with their cloud service. This way you can access your notes from multiple devices. Additionally Evernote does OCR on pictures you store in notes. This way you can for instance take pictures of business cards and search for the text on it. That is pretty neat.

I’m using different Browsers on different Platforms. But I want to have my Bookmarks available in all those browsers. The most versatile tool seems Xmarks to me. It has a plugins for most popular browsers and thus keeps my bookmarks in sync. Be careful with their additional offering called “LastPass”. That one can sync your stored password with their cloud service. But they have been hacked several times on the past…

Of course one can’t remember passwords for all the online services and website that are in use. So either you use the same password everywhere (bad idea) or you use different passwords and try to memorize them somehow. I use 1Password to help me with that. It stores all the passwords in a strongly encrypted database file and hooks in to my browsers to easily fill in on demand. You can sync the password file via DropBox to your other computers and even to 1Password on the iPhone. So you always have your passwords at hand.

The good thing is that you passwords are encrypted in a file that you own. Not in a cloud service where you hope the provider encrypts them properly.

GTD is a big hype and there meanwhile tens or even hundreds of tools out there to help you getting your tasks and lists organize. OmniFocus was one of the first tools around and is very versatile and capable. Some people complain about the rather technical UI compared to fancier alternatives like “Things” or “The Hit List“. But apart from it’s powerful features OmniFocus has one big advantage. It can sync it’s database with the iPhone version via any WebDAV folder. So I don’t need to pay for an additional cloud service but instead can use my own web server to sync the database between iPhone and MacBook.

I know we all hate the MS Outlook style of referencing dates by giving the week number of the year. I always struggle if someone gives me week number and expects me to know when that’s gonna be. I hardly know any mail client other than MS Outlook that displays weeks numbers at all.

But for peace sake I’ll show you how to display this secret information on your shiny MacOS X as well.

The trick is to create a custom format for the full data listing in the System Preferences. Just add the place holder for the Week to the format definition and it will show up in your menu bar clock and even in iCal.

At the current stage the all new GTD application “The Hit List” has no direct support for fetching certain emails from Mail.app and make tasks out of them. OmniFocus does it and there is a AppleScript for Things to accomplish this.

I searched the internet a little but didn’t found a script for Mail.app and THL. So I wrote a little mail-to-thl1 for myself:

using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages theMessages for rule theRule
tell application "Mail"
set theMailCount to (count of theMessages)
repeat with counter from 1 to theMailCount
set msg to item counter of theMessages
set theAttachmentCount to (count of mail attachments of msg)
set _title to subject of msg
set _sender to sender of msg
set _messageURL to "message://%3c" & msg's message id & "%3e"
tell application "The Hit List"
tell inbox to set theTask to make new task with properties {title:_title & " from " & _sender & " @email", notes:_messageURL}
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from

I use a simple Mail.app rule to execute the AppleScript on the arrival of certain eMail. This script then creates a new task for every Mail in the THL inbox and atteches a link to the mail as note to the task.

We love all the funky keystrokes to control our applications. They save a lot of mouse kilometers and let us control our Mac applications in a more geeky way.

But to be honest – who can remember all the secret key strokes for all the applications? Clearly not me. I often considered to create me a cheat sheet with all my favorite applications shortcuts.

But today I found a smarter solution on a screenshot from Sascha Assbach – KeyCue. This is a little invisible application which displays all the keyboard shortcuts of the current application in a nice overlay. You simply have to press ⌘-Key a few seconds and the overlay appears.

Yesterday I noticed a new clean and lean GTD application called “The Hitlist” from Potion Factory. It’s got a simply and clean interface but still seems to have all the essential functionalities one would expect from a powerfull GTD application.

I did just a short test and some screenshots to get a vast overview and like to share it.

The Main screen features the Inbox and a sidebar with access to all important areas:

One can open several tabs in the main view although you can access the areas via the sidebar. But when you hide the sidebar you’ll still able to access the other lists via the tabs.

Very important for me is the feature to collect tasks in projects and nest projects into projects. This is one of the major features I miss in Things from Cultured Code.

The bottom bar can show either a filter (on tags) or dynamic hints.

Tags and context can be entered by prepending them with a special character (@ for contexts, / for tags). This is very usefull as you don’t have to switch to another input field to enter tags and contexts.

So all over it seems a very lean but still powerfull application. I’ll stay with OmniFocus for the moment but “The Hitlist” is definitly worth a closer look.

Today Apple released the beta version of its Safari Browser to the public. The new, 4th generation of Safari has some nice feature you already know from Finder or iTunes – Coverflow like overview.

You can view your browsing history or your bookmarks in the CoverFlow view.
Another major change is the position of the TAB bar. The tabs are now positioned on the top of the window. This is disturbing as most other browsers have the tabs below the address bar or direct on top of the websites.I didn’t found a property where this could be changed by now. Maybe Apple developers make up their minds on this to the final release.

The beta version is fast and slick. I will test it the next few days and will report on any further issues.